Clarence Page

Ever since Donald Trump entered the Republican presidential race, I have been waiting to see him lose. I wanted to see how he would handle it. Humility, after all, is not an emotion with which The Donald appears to be intimately familiar.

Remember when his rival Ben Carson, the retired brain surgeon, was running neck and neck with him in polls back in November, occasionally beating him? “How stupid are the people of Iowa?” Mr. Trump raged about Dr. Carson in a Fort Dodge rant. “How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?”

What, I wondered, would be his reaction if the people of Iowa decide with their votes that they are not going to believe Mr. Trump’s crap either? Would he stand in stunned disbelief? Would he stagger off the stage babbling nonsense? Would he howl in protest about how he was robbed, perhaps by illegal immigrants?

We found out Monday night after he decisively lost Iowa’s Republican caucuses to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and finished only a whisper ahead of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Mr. Trump tried something that was different, even for him. Call it “humility lite.”

“I absolutely love the people of Iowa,” he said, beaming his wall-to-wall grin like a beacon in the night. “Unbelievable.”

And he repeated himself in his usual fashion (“I love you people,” he said. “I love you people”) as if he were talking to third-graders or perhaps trying to woo the crowd through mass hypnosis — and repeated himself again.

“I’m honored,” he said. “I’m really honored.”

He congratulated the winner Sen. Cruz, thanked Mike Huckabee for dropping out and failed to mention Sen. Rubio, who finished third in a fashion that over-performed his polling as much as The Donald underperformed. “We will go on to get the Republican nomination and we will go on to beat Hillary or Bernie or whoever the hell they throw out there.”

But Mr. Trump left quickly. What more was there for him to say? His spell was broken. All of his talk about what a winner he was in a world full of “loo-zahs” and how he was going to make all of us winners, too, had fallen to dust.

When he’s elected, he used to say, “There will be so much winning ...!”

Ah, not this time, loo-zah.

Suddenly the emperor had no clothes. The man behind the curtain was exposed as a mere mortal, a carnival hustler and flim-flam man who came to town to pitch his magical elixir and motivate the rubes to feel good about themselves in a wicked world full of things that make conservatives worry about their children’s futures — like illegal immigrants, overseas trade, political correctness and, lest we forget, Rosie O’Donnell.

Thanks for a great fantasy, The Donald, but votes are for real.

The man who never admits to making a mistake apparently grossly underestimated the importance of building a strong on-the-ground grassroots campaign in every single county if you want to win Iowa. That was how Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in 2008 and why Sen. Cruz worked tirelessly on his own ground game.

Mr. Trump, a virtual master of all media, apparently thought his formidable celebrity and overflow rally crowds was enough. It wasn’t. Watch for more Trump volunteers to knock on doors and ring doorbells in New Hampshire.

And which candidate was the first to claim victory in front of the television cameras? Significantly it was neither Sen. Cruz nor Mr. Trump. It was Sen. Rubio. He finished third, but you would not have guessed from the celebration that he and his family brought onstage while music played and the crowd cheered.

I was reminded of how Bill Clinton is remembered for winning the 1992 New Hampshire primary, even though he actually came in second. He did such a grand job of declaring himself “The Comeback Kid” that he set a new standard for making a loss look like a win.

In similar fashion, Sen. Rubio looked like a winner and had earned it. As Bret Baier noted on Fox News, Iowa’s vote was the first poll to show Sen. Rubio with more than 20 percent support. Sen. Rubio finished Iowa like a rocket in full liftoff. Sen. Cruz finished in orbit. Mr. Trump fizzled on the launch pad.